Literature and Anthology
During his six-year stay in Hispanic America he completed his most famous book The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which was published anonymously in 1912. It was only during 1927 that Johnson admitted his authorship, stressing that it was not a work of autobiography but mostly fictional. His other works include The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), Black Manhattan (1930), his exploration of the contribution of African-Americans to the culture of New York, and Negro Americans, What Now? (1934), a book advocating civil rights for African Americans. Johnson was also an anthologist. His anthologies concerned African-American themes and were part of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. He also wrote the melody for the song "Dem Bones".
Read more about this topic: James Weldon Johnson
Famous quotes containing the words literature and/or anthology:
“As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man’s family.”
—J.M. (John Millington)
“You’ve strung your breasts
with a rattling rope of pearls,
tied a jangling belt
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and clinking jewelled anklets
on both your feet.
So, stupid,
if you run off to your lover like this,
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and look up, down;
in every direction?”
—Amaru (c. seventh century A.D.?, Kashmirian king, compiler, author of some of the poems in the anthology which bears his name. translated from the Amaruataka by Martha Ann Selby, vs. 31, Motilal Banarsidass (1983)